Kevin Durant

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Couper Moorhead

1. With a real day off and a proper shootaround under his belt, Terry Rozier came out looking far more comfortable, scoring eight of the first 11 points including a four-point play out of the corner. Scorers like Rozier who rely on dribble creation will always run a little hot and cold, but the breakout was always going to come.

Miami as a whole, however, was still a little up and down coming into this one with a six-game losing streak. With neither team shooting particularly well, Phoenix held the early advantage in the paint thanks to backup center Drew Eubanks, finishing plays with Jusuf Nurkic in foul troube, pacing them to an eventual double-digit lead, and once they were up their scoring trio of Devin Booker, Bradley Beal and Kevin Durant all took turns holding Miami’s pushes – off Jimmy Butler (26 points on 12 shots) drives, a handful of threes and offensive boards – with off-the-bounce shotmaking. By halftime, Phoenix up 13, the Suns had nine makes in the restricted area to Miami’s six.

Another quick burst from Phoenix put them up 18 early in the third, Butler’s paint attacks and offensive rebounding along with Rozier’s shooting (21 points on 14 shots) again pulling Miami back within reason only for more mid-range making, this stretch coming from Booker, to push the lead back toward 20. The press-zone bought Miami a little bit of time but Phoenix adjusted well, limiting their turnovers and finding the open looks for their bevy of shooters. Suns by 26, a steady, gradual climb to that point, with the HEAT’s defense looking for traction.

A few Suns misses, Eric Gordon twice open in the corner with no reward, two threes from Josh Richardson and Tyler Herro and a pick-six steal from Richardson (just the fifth Suns turnovers of the night) gave Miami life, an 8-0 run to make the deficit 18. It was a comeback in earnest, a bit of a make-or-miss founded comeback with Phoenix attempting a string of corner threes as they worked the ball around the zone, and eventually Miami was within 13 with 4:41 to go against a Phoenix team that has had its share of fourth-quarter issues this season. They made it a game of it with a 31-18 final period but it wasn’t enough, Phoenix taking this one 108-105 as Miami dropped its seventh in a row.

2. While they wound up taking 40 threes due to all of Miami’s late-game zone – see below – the Suns are, even with all their deadly shooting, one of the highest volume mid-range teams in the league. All of Booker, Beal and Durant can get to their one or two dribble pull-ups with ease over the top of any coverage, and they often live and die on those shots.

Through the first three quarters, they did quite a bit of living. After the Eubanks-led paint points stacked up in the first period, the Suns’ lead guys started to get going, making 14-of-23 non-paint two pointers including 7-of-10 outside the paint. In the past – granted, before Beal and Durant – this was always an interesting matchup because the HEAT were primarily a switching team and switching had a way of disrupting all the pick-and-roll work Phoenix wanted to do. But with Miami playing primarily drop coverage this season, conceding a little space in the middle of the floor even as Bam Adebayo manages that space as well as anyone, Phoenix was able to get to what they do best against the HEAT’s base coverages, which may be why so much zone came into play later on. Booker, Beal and Durant combined for a modest 61 points on 59 shots as their percentages fell late, Miami otherwise doubling mismatches to keep any of them from finding a comfortable rhythm one-on-one, but they helped Phoenix build their lead in those middle periods.

3. This was one of the strangest fourth quarters of the season when it comes to the rhythm of the game. You had Miami in its press-zone for almost the entire period, a scheme designed to drain the shot clock of the other team and limit drives while they work the ball around the perimeter. Then you had Phoenix in its prevent offense, happy to beak the press and then slow things way down, not shooting until the final six seconds on the clock, working the ball around the arc until they inevitably found a corner three.

It was a gambit from Erik Spoelstra, playing the odds on outside jumpers, and it came relatively close to paying off. Phoenix shot 3-of-8 on corner threes – remember, they had Durant, Beal and Booker on the floor for most of this stretch – and 1-of-7 on above-the-break triples with just two attempts in the restricted area. It was a sink-or-swim shot profile, of course, if more of those shots fall the game is pretty much over but because threes are generally higher value but lower on the field-goal percentage scale, a cold stretch like this one allowed Miami to get back into the game on the strength of their own 5-of-8 shooting from three in the quarter. It was all a very stop-and-start affair, punctuated by Miami’s burst of shotmaking, and it panned out as far as the quarter went even if the deficit was too great at the start of it.

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Coup's Takeaways: HEAT Attempt Late Comeback But Suns Hold On After Building Big Lead

At 35-years old, after a few highly potent runs with the Houston Rockets, Tucker was traded to the Milwaukee Bucks midway through last season and got his first bite. Playing 30 minutes a night, he reached the summit. That was it. His moment. The pinnacle of a decade-long career. An ultimate prize for setting well over 4,000 iron-clad screens and fighting through a thousand more than that.

For some, it’s that moment when the foot, perhaps unknowingly, starts to ease off the gas. As though it’s as difficult to simultaneously apply pressure and put on a championship ring as it is to pat your head and rub your stomach. Tucker waited for that sensation that never came.

“That might be the biggest lie I’ve heard,” Tucker said. “People say that once you make it, you just kind of get complacent, you’re just kind of like whatever. It’s actually the exact opposite. It makes you want it more. That’s why I get now why guys win it and they can’t go to bad teams. I couldn’t play this game and not fight for a championship ever again. There’s no way. It’s impossible.

“Once you hold that trophy up and you go through that, you reach the top of the mountaintop, there’s no other place to be but that. The hunger for that is like nothing else. I thought that I wanted one bad, and then you win it and you want it worse. It was just crazy. It makes sense, you think once you win it it’s like, ‘Oh, I won it, who cares.’ [Now] it’s like, ‘I want it again.’”

It’s tough to hear Tucker say those words, with the conviction he says them with, and not wonder how he and the Miami HEAT had never crossed paths before. “This has been a long time coming,” Tucker said upon signing his contract last summer, “I’ve always said I could play in Miami.” Maybe the basketball gods recognized how snug the fit would be and conspired to keep each party at arm’s length until Tucker’s mid-30’s. But once the Bucks opted not to re-sign him, there he was looking for work in the vastness of summer like a wandering samurai at the end of a long career of sheath-and-unsheath. It just so happened that the next village he walked into was also full of samurai. And they were all working together. Liquid Swords played in the background.

“I love P.J., man,” Udonis Haslem says, offering his rare seal of approval. “I’ll play with P.J. seven days a week and twice on Sundays. What doesn’t he do? He might lead us in offensive rebounds. He comes flying in. Giving us extra possessions. He’s taking charges. He switches pick-and-rolls. He accepts every matchup. He never complains about plays. He only complains about bad defense. That’s the kind of teammate that I want.”

The kind of teammate everyone wants, to hear it told by those sharing the locker room.

It’s December 4 and the HEAT just fell to the Giannis Antetokounmpo-less Milwaukee Bucks by 22 points, Miami’s third loss in four nights and the end of a week-long slide on the defensive end that coincided with the loss of Bam Adebayo to a thumb injury for four-to-six weeks along with a tailbone injury to Jimmy Butler. Tucker is asked how the team can get their man-to-man defense, which began the season at a historically stifling level, back on track.

“Just play defense,” he says, laughing. “I’m sorry, that’s a funny question. Defense is just playing defense. Staying in between your man and the ball. It’s getting ball pressure, it’s getting a contest on shots, it’s being able to stay in front of your man. That’s what defense is. There’s no other way to get around it.”

It's the sort of answer that isn’t all that uncommon among premier defenders, akin to Adebayo regularly boiling down defensive responsibilities to “Guard your yard” over the past few years. The better you are at something, the easier you can make it sound. Ask a composer how he writes music or a director how he storyboards an action scene out of nothing and you’re liable to receive some form of, ‘I just do it.’ Defense is what Tucker does, and he knows it comes simpler to him than to others.

“It’s what I’m good at and what I’m focused on,” Tucker said. “Just energy, effort, focus. That’s it. When you got that and you get five guys, I don’t care who it is, you get five guys on the same page with energy, effort and focus, they can get stops and they can win a basketball game.”

It’s far more nuanced than that. That’s the summary. The setup. As one of the handful of players in the league who can legitimately claim to defend all five positions – “There’s sometimes when I say that term, one-through-five, I wish I could have him guard all five guys,” Spoelstra says – and who has switched more pick-and-rolls over the past five years than all but Clint Capela, Tucker has to know the tendencies of every primary and secondary and tertiary option in the league. He does the work, digging into the film and the numbers as he collects all the information necessary to do his job well.

“It’s a little more to defending Giannis [than energy],” Tucker said, again with a chuckle. “It’s knowing your personnel, paying attention to detail, small things. Guys get in certain situations or spots on the floor, knowing when to help, knowing when to go back home. It’s so detailed to be able to stop a team like Milwaukee.”

Four days after the loss in Wisconsin, the Bucks come to town. Antetokounmpo plays, scoring just 15 points on 13 shots as Tucker stands firmly in the way in every way the two-time MVP approached the paint. It’s one of the worst games Antetokounmpo had played in years, according to Basketball-Reference.com’s Game Score, and one of Milwaukee worst offensive performances of the season.

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P.J. Tucker vs. Giannis Feature

“His ability to take on all the big challenges,” Spoelstra said. “Whether it’s Giannis or [Khris] Middleton or sometimes with [Jrue] Holiday, we were able to keep our defense at bay at certain points during the game because of his toughness and savviness. You just can’t teach that. That’s just being a great competitor.

“And his voice, just constantly calling out schemes and where guys are supposed to be, encouraging guys, getting on guys in huddles. All of that, was 10x.”

It’s a voice everyone is used to by now. In huddles, in the game, at practice, shootaround, watching film. It’s ubiquitous. Haslem used the word complain earlier, but that doesn’t quite match Tucker’s purpose. His voice is correctional. Instructional. Guiding. A light in the dark.

Somehow he does it without being overbearing, threading the needle between forceful and rubbing people the wrong way. Let’s let the team tell it:

“Whenever he sees something, he shares it right away,” Duncan Robinson says. “Sometimes if you see something and hold on to it, it can get lost in translation in time. He’s not bashful about sharing his opinions, which is great because it gets everything out in the open.”

“If there’s something that he sees needs correction, he’s not going to wait until the next day or the next week. He’s going to correct it with that guy right then and there in real time on the court or on the bench. He’s the real deal,” Tyler Herro says.

“A lot of it is that realness and genuineness and rawness that he comes with. You already know it’s not from a bad place,” Gabe Vincent says.

“No bull****. Brutal honesty. He’ll say it to your face, say it straight up,” Omer Yurtseven says. “We know his intentions. He’s trying to help us out in any way we can.”

“Tuck is one of the loudest people in the gym. When he talks, everybody hears him,” Caleb Martin says. “You know he comes from a good place. When he says things it’s to benefit you and the team. He’s not saying anything to be malicious.”

“It’s just little technical things that he keeps his eye on,” Max Strus says. “He sees everything and knows where everybody should be at every point in the game. It [could be] just as simple as rotating and being on the help side. You got to be there. If you’re not there, he’s going to get on you. He just knows every single thing about defense and he’s always right.”

It would all be a lot – “You can’t be sensitive,” adds Dewayne Dedmon – if Tucker weren’t accountable to himself. If you ever want to know what HEAT Culture actually is, according to those who live it every day, accountability will always be the word near the top of the list. Strus may say that Tucker is always right, but the way he knows that is Tucker is just as hard on himself as he is on anyone else. That’s The Tuck Rule. Be willing to shoulder the blame. Point the finger at yourself before pointing it at anyone else.

“I’m not perfect, I f*** up all the time,” Tucker says. “But my thing is, if I mess up, I’m not going to do it again. You don’t do the same thing twice. It’s being able to know you’re wrong, take criticism and get better. That’s how you become a good defensive team.”

One of the odder numbers of the season is that Miami has a worse defensive rating with Tucker on the floor (108.1) than off (101.9), which may be as good a cautionary tale for using team numbers to describe individual performance as there is. Part of it is that teams are shooting better from three in Tucker’s minutes, and at the volume Miami allows threes – largely as a result of the extent to which they leave perimeter players to help on drives and seal off the paint – every percentage point makes a sizeable dent. Another chunk is that until Miami’s recent wins against Milwaukee and Chicago, Tucker’s smallball lineups hadn’t been effective on the defensive end. A full-time center for a stretch in Houston, Tucker was surrounded there by stout post defenders who could all hold up on a switch down low. When Miami is forced into playing Tucker at that spot due to a sheer lack of bodies, they don’t have the same switchable personnel to rely on.

You don’t have to look to far to know that Tucker is holding up his end of the bargain. Of the 26 players that have defended at least 50 isolations where the ballhandler did not pass out, Tucker is No. 6 allowing .71 points-per-iso according to Second Spectrum tracking data. He’s only defended 15 isolations where the ballhandler passed into an assist opportunity because the HEAT don’t have to send him help – keeping their defense at bay, as Spoelstra put it earlier.

Of the 85 players who have defended over 200 pick-and-rolls, Tucker is No. 26 allowing 0.91 points-per-pick. That’s four spots below Rudy Gobert and two spots below Antetokounmpo. Hilariously, the 6-foot-5 Tucker who switches onto every big in the league has only defended 16 post-ups all season, allowing 0.31 points-per-post. Everyone knows better than to try him.

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P.J. Tucker Iso/Post Defense

And before you worry that the HEAT are having to rely on Tucker defending up in size too much in Adebayo’s absence, that there’s going to be a cost to pay come the postseason, here’s his perspective:

“The five is the easiest thing to play for me. I get to direct the defense, I get to talk and be who I am. I get to help out a lot. Five is easy for me,” Tucker says.

“It’s hard to guard Kevin Durant and pick him up and turn him and stay in front of him. That takes a toll on your body.”

The HEAT are not a traditional offensive team. They value rim attacks, but they average some of the fewest drives in the league. Instead, they pressure the paint with the pass, setting up a variety of screens for cutters or using the gravity of their shooters to draw two to the ball and letting their bigs play with an advantage.

When Adebayo is available, he is the key. He holds the ball at the elbow and waits for Tyler Herro or Duncan Robinson to create separation on a cut. He rolls off blitzing defenders and works the middle of the floor with the ball. He’s the one on the other end of the pocket pass or the lob. Miami isn’t as reliant on his playmaking this year as they have been in the past with Kyle Lowry on hand to set the table, but Adebayo’s steady presence as both a play finisher and play continuer still enables everything they want to be.

Without Adebayo and Butler – far and away the team leader in drives – Spoelstra has turned to his now-36-year old role player to be something nobody has asked him to be in years.

“That’s one of the things that we just wanted to give a vision to,” Spoelstra said. “Bam is one of the most unique players in this league, you just cannot put him in any kind of conventional box on either side of the floor. His versality is dynamic and unique. But P.J. has a lot of those qualities and we need that right now. We’ll use P.J. in a lot of the ways that we used Bam and he’s showing us that he’s capable of a lot of that. He’s a very smart player, I already think he’s one of the best screeners, if not the best screeners, in the league. Those kinds of guys you usually can put more on their plate and they’ll be able to figure it out.”

In eight seasons prior, Tucker averaged 1.8 screens per 100 possessions where the ballhandler passed to the screener for a shot or an additional pass. This season, that number is 3.6. Since the team lost Adebayo, the number is 6.1.

For comparison, the league’s preeminent short-roll playmaker, Draymond Green, is averaging 3.7 such plays per 100 possessions. At the absolute apex of the regular season Golden State Warriors in the Steph Curry era, 2015-16, Green’s short-roll number was 5.5.

Tucker isn’t just figuring it out, he’s becoming a legitimate playmaker as the HEAT are getting 1.26 points-per-pick when he gets the ball after setting the screen. Better yet, he has yet to commit a turnover out of those actions and he is somehow using four-dimensional math to make it look like he’s made more jump-stop floaters than he’s actually attempted (55.4 percent on non-rim two’s, a career-high to an absurd degree).

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P.J. Tucker Short Rolls

“I think people forget how good P.J. Tucker was,” Lowry said. “He played overseas (Israel, Ukraine, Germany). He’s known for his defense but in college (Texas) that man was an automatic double-double. He’s always been, not put in a so-called box but he starred in his role, he was a screener, playing the five. Now we’re putting the ball in his hands a lot more right now with the situation that we’re in.”

“It’s just opportunity,” says Tucker, averaging a career-high 3.8 assists per 100 possessions, even throwing bouncers to backdoor cutters from the elbow. “Getting the opportunity and chance to do it. A lot of teams had me in the corner for spacing.”

These recent developments may be a pleasant surprise to the HEAT, but what they knew they would get was screening and spacing. For the latter is yes and then some, with Tucker shooting a career-high 44.7 percent from three – again, in his tenth season – while leading the league with 31 corner triples on a ridiculous 56.7 percent from the right corner.

Which leaves us with one of the most fun in-game parlor games this season: watching Tucker hunt for hammer screens. On any given possession when you see Tucker lingering in the dunker spot along the baseline, let your eyes linger there for a beat or two and leave the ball alone. Watch what Tucker is watching and enjoy when he crushes unsuspecting defenders attempting to scramble out to the shooter who is suddenly sliding into unprotected space.

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P.J. Tucker Hammer Screens

“P.J. is amazing,” Robinson said. “He doesn’t care about literally anything but that scoreboard. He’ll do whatever it takes to win. He’ll come up to me and say my goal is to get you 15 threes. He’s just unselfish like that.

“He has such a high IQ/ He’s been doing it for so long. He has a great feel for when to slide on the baseline, when to space out versus when to set a screen. For me, a lot of it is just listening to him and playing off of his reads.

Years ago you would have had to take our word for it that Tucker was one of the most prolific hammer screeners in the league. Now, we have the data. According to Second Spectrum, Tucker has set 81 off-ball screens along either baseline this season. The next highest is Fred VanVleet. He has 39. The league leader last season, Jae Crowder, set 83 screens in those two zones.

“He’s like a heat-seeking missile as a screener,” Pat Riley said earlier this season.

You know it when you see it with certain role players. The HEAT have been blessed with a handful of them over the past decade. Shane Battier. Luol Deng. Jae Crowder. Andre Iguodala. Just to name the wings who could all fill, in their own unique ways, the hybrid power-forward spot that has become so crucial in Spoelstra’s builds. You watch them each night, through blowouts and garbage time and Tuesday nights in January and primetime in May, and you grow to appreciate everything they do.

You know, from watching nights of screens and helps rotations and switches and deflections, this is the type of player any team would want. The type of player who, once they’re gone, the HEAT are going to have to do everything they can to find another one. Free agents are compared to them. Draft picks are assigned them as upside.

But you also know, deep down, that there won’t be another one. They’re as unique and effective in their roles as any max-player is in how he gets to twenty points. You can replace, not replicate.

Tucker was already as rare a player as you’ll find. The microball center who works better than most regular centers. Somehow, a decade deep into a career of service, of setting up and defending the best players, he’s been better, and more expansive, than ever. That’s worth your appreciation, and a watchful eye while he’s here for you to watch.

“He’s just a winning player,” Spoelstra said. “That’s probably the shame of it. To the average fan, unless we constantly educate people, no one will have any idea of how many things that he impacts.”

Enemies defeated, conflict settled, calm achieved, job done, the wandering samurai always walks out of frame at the end of the movie. You never know how long he’ll stay, but the village never forgets the days under his watch.

“Whether it’s a conversation, whether its advice, whether it’s a check-in, you can tell he cares,” Vincent says.

“It’s hard not to love him as a teammate,” Robinson says.

“The ultimate teammate,” adds Strus. “Great dude to have in the locker room, takes care of everybody, looks out for everyone, and he’s definitely our leader on the defensive end. He keeps us together.”

NBA locker rooms are many things, but they are rarely wrong. They know fake when they smell it, and to hear the players tell it, Tucker is as real as they come.

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Everybody Loves P.J. Tucker

A couple years back, the Miami HEAT beating one of the best teams in the league would have felt like a monumental occasion, a highlight of the season for a team trying to prove it belonged in the upper echelon.

This year, with a team full of veterans who have been there done that in the regular season, it was just Wednesday.

“We got a team with a lot of guys that have won, that have had that experience of getting that championship so they know what it takes,” Bam Adebayo said. “My previous years, we haven’t had more than two guys [with that experience].”

There was a formula for Miami winning these sort of games, one that held true for the past two or three iterations of this roster. Shoot well. Make sure the other team did not shoot well. Sure, there were exceptions to that rule especially when some last-second shots were involved, but generally if they were taking down a Top 5 team you could look at the box-score and sure enough one team would be over 40 percent from deep and the other team would be in the 20’s.

Against the Brooklyn Nets, the HEAT shot 8-of-29 (27.6 percent) from three and 39.6 percent from the field. The Nets didn’t shoot well, either, which lent the game at least a hint of postseason feel.

“It feels good being able to win games knowing that you’re not making shots,” Jimmy Butler said.

To pull it off Miami had to do a couple things they haven’t done in years past, and another they’ve been building up to for a good long while.

The first is simple. With their shots not falling, they crashed the offensive glass, punishing a Brooklyn roster that likes to play small and played even smaller with Nic Claxton out due to an illness. Miami’s 17 offensive boards would have been the most in any single game in either of the past two years. Over and over the Nets would get a stop and threaten to string together two or three scoring possessions and take the lead, but then Dewayne Dedmon (six offensive rebounds) or P.J. Tucker (four) or Jimmy Butler (four) would get their hands on the ball and breathe life back into Miami’s possession.

“It’s been a quality of the team that we noticed early on,” Erik Spoelstra said. “We hoped that this would be a good rebounding team, it’s something that we focused on as an organization in the offseason.”

It’s a bit of a misnomer to say that the 2020-21 HEAT were a bad rebounding team – I am begging everyone to stop using raw rebounding margin for anything, ever – since they were just about bang-on average on the defensive glass. Because the transition defense was often so porous, that group couldn’t afford to chase second chances, where they ranked No. 29. Coupled with the team’s below-average turnover rate, opposing teams routinely put up more shots than them.

“That’s pretty much true for every team, if you can create more possessions than your opponent then it’s always good,” Kevin Durant said following the loss.

Through four games, this team is No. 7 on the offensive glass, in part by choice, and No. 2 on the defensive side, through upgraded personnel – if you watched the playoffs last year you saw Tucker pull down one huge offensive board after another for the eventual champion Milwaukee Bucks. Most importantly, the HEAT finished plus-11 in field-goal attempts over the Nets.

The second aspect they’ve added to their game is speed. We’re only four games into the marathon and you probably feel like you’ve heard about this ad nauseum by now, but it’s a big deal that Kyle Lowry has injected a significant dose of full-court dynamism into this group. Just as the offensive glass afforded Miami chances inside when they couldn’t finish over-the-top, their 18 fast-break points were the easiest points they got all evening.

The HEAT have been trying to run for years, in one way or another. Each season they would start off playing up-tempo, trying to manufacture points to help them overcome nights when their dribble-handoff-heavy halfcourt offense would get jammed up. And each season their turnover numbers would spike as it became clear that the personnel just wasn’t there for that style, despite the best efforts of Goran Dragic to blaze trails, so by December Spoelstra would slow things down and by the end of the year, Miami would be bringing up the caboose in the pace rankings (they finished No. 29 last season). Pace isn’t always a perfect measure given that better defensive teams tend to draw out possessions, but the slowdown vibes translated to offensive possession length as the majority of transition scores came after live turnovers.

This year, Miami is playing almost a full second faster on offense with Kyle Lowry on the floor. Rather than relying on pick-six steals from Butler to create those opportunities, rather than running just to run, it’s functional speed. Off makes, off misses, everyone knows that a hard-run route will get a look from the quarterback. Teams won’t all be as leaky in their open-court awareness as the Nets were in the first half – the Nets cleaned things up themselves as the game wore on – and Miami may only end up an average team in pace, but if all a season of these open floor reps creates is a handful of easy buckets in a hard-fought playoff series, it will have been worth it.

Big picture, the offensive glass and transition scores are accents which will emphasize everything the HEAT do well, foundationally. They will be a factor, as they were last night, but they won’t always be front and center, the things the other team is talking about after the game as the Nets were, as the focus and preparation of their opponents shift.

What will matter every single time down the floor is Miami’s ability to switch.

We don’t need to rehash Miami’s recent history with switching too much. We’ve done that plenty. They acquired Jae Crowder two years ago, gradually shifted from conservative drop coverage to a switch-heavy scheme and have rarely ever looked back. With Lowry and Tucker now in the fold, along with Markieff Morris off the bench, Miami has the bodies to be one of the best switching teams in the league. That ability may not ever matter more than when they play the Nets. It’s that same personnel that can switch so well that also allows the HEAT to be selective with their switching. If an opponent is just running through the motions in their offensive sets, a Lowry or Tucker or Butler can simply navigate the screens themselves and stay home on their man until the shot clock gets short and *smacks fist into an open palm* now there’s the switch and Durant is trying to score on Adebayo. Or they can switch early and blow up the possession, turning it into a one-on-one show.

Miami switched 30 pick-and-rolls against Brooklyn, per Second Spectrum, a higher number but not the highest number (typically in the upper 40’s), and allowed just 0.75 points per possession when those actions were involved. With multiple MVP’s on the floor, you can loose an arrow into that number on the stat report and circle it in sharpie.

It’s pretty apparent that the Nets certainly aren’t fully operational, for a variety of reasons, at this stage in the season. There are some things to sort out with their roster – we’ll just leave that at that – James Harden is clearly working his way into his best rhythm and they haven’t shown the same out-of-the-box sharpness that the HEAT have had in spades. But the HEAT aren’t who they want to be yet, either, as they tell it.

“I think we’re ok right now,” Tucker said of the defense. “We’re not great. It’s not great. Trust me. It’s not perfect. The thing with switching is even when you mess up, having each other’s back and when you rotate and communicate. There’s so many more things that go into it.

“You’re going to mess up, but it’s the effort and energy that go into messing up. We do that. That’s a key to it. That’s a huge key to it. That’s a reason why our defense has looked solid so far. Has it been good? Debatable. But we play hard, so I think we’re going to get better and better at it as the season goes on.”

Miami is allowing 92 points per 100 possessions through four games. It’s been over five years since any team finished under 100. The numbers will probably get a little worse, even as the team gets better and tighter in their switching and their rotations. That’ll balance out with the jumpers starting to fall eventually – they will, though we may need to talk about a possible and apparent shift toward the mid-range in the coming weeks. They can still be so much better than they’ve been, and they’ve been great on defense. Great in a way that matters, in a way that translates directly to the switch-heavy postseason, in a way that tells you that beating the Brooklyn Nets in October means at least something.

Change has been good for this roster, so far, and they’ll continue to change and evolve from now until April. Brooklyn will be different by then, too. But beating a great team in the regular season felt a little different this time around, in part because the expectations are higher than they’ve been in some time, in part because they won in a way that didn’t feel like October at all.

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The NBA knows him as Gabe Vincent, an undrafted former G-Leaguer who has played fewer than one thousand total minutes over the past two seasons with the Miami HEAT.

On Saturday night in Las Vegas, as Team Nigeria upset the USA Men’s Basketball Team, some of the league’s best players were introduced to Nnamdi. It’s the name Vincent didn’t think to use until he visited Nigeria and was asked, pointedly and repeatedly, what is your name.

“That’s very much part of my culture. When I put on that jersey, that’s the name I put on my back because that’s how people recognize me,” Vincent said.

It’s the name Vincent wore as he scored 21 points against the likes of Damian Lillard and Bradley Beal. It’s the name he wore as he clinched the win with a pair of free throws in the final seconds of what is likely – we won’t claim expertise here but it certainly seems to be the case – one of the greatest sporting victories in the history of not only Nigeria, but the African continent.

“It’s almost like an alter ego of sorts. I almost become a different person.”

The results were different, which we’ll get to in a moment, but the player was the same one HEAT fans will recognize. You don’t carve a spot for yourself in the league the way Vincent has, earning a two-way contract with the Miami HEAT two years after he went undrafted out of UC Santa Barbara, without being a grinder. Even when his shot wasn’t falling, Vincent often made his way onto Erik Spoelstra’s court through sheer force of will on the defensive end and his steady composure on the other. He wasn’t even a shoo in to make the Nigerian team when he joined them in 2019. He had to earn his way to that roster spot, too.

That the shots didn’t fall during the regular season was strange enough. Vincent’s mechanics are steady, compact and consistent, so it was always a bit of a head scratcher that he shot just 31 percent from deep across 50 appearances. In no way did he look like a 31 percent shooter, nor did any of his past history imply that that’s what he was.

When Vincent hit six of his eight threes against Team USA, nothing looked different. The ball just went it, maybe more like it should have all along.

“I can’t say we came into this game expecting to shoot extremely well from three . . . but we did,” Vincent said.

In classic slash modern upset fashion, the entire Nigerian team shot 20-of-42 from deep – holding off run after run with shot after shot – as Team USA only attempted 24 threes of their own. To put that number in perspective, before the 2010 season an NBA team had only hit 20 threes in a playoff game once. One time. Uno.

The great equalizer did plenty of equalizing.

“The three-point game was the difference tonight,” USA coach Gregg Popovich said.

It wasn’t the whole story, though, which Popovich agreed with, saying it would be a mistake to ‘let [Team USA] off the hook’ by writing the evenings events off as just a hot shooting night. The rest of the world has been catching up on the talent front for decades. Nigeria, with a roster full of past, present and future NBA players, is only the latest team to do so.

“Every year teams are better and better,” Popovich said. “Every year one two or three more NBA players are on their teams.”

Joining Vincent in the Nigerian starting five were HEAT teammates KZ Okpala and Precious Achiuwa. Okpala went scoreless on just four shots but just a day after Nigeria head coach Mike Brown said he thought Okpala had future Defensive Player of the Year potential, Brown backed his own words up asking Okpala to pick up Lillard full court.

And later on it was Okpala marking Kevin Durant with Team USA down three in the closing moments.

Also on the Durant front, Achiuwa had the highlight of the night doing this to the former MVP at the rim.

Achiuwa attempted two threes, something he rarely did in his first season in Miami, and made one, while pulling down a clutch rebound in the final minute.

We’ll track the progress of all three HEAT players as the summer continues, as well as the performance of Bam Adebayo, who started at center for Team USA. Those are all stories for another day. For now, for today, this is about history, and the role that the name Nnamdi played in it. It may have just been an exhibition game on paper. The ultimate goal, as Vincent noted postgame, may be to medal. But you try telling anyone that this game didn’t matter.

“I don’t think any African team has been able to beat USA Basketball in an exhibition game or a real game,” Brown said. “To try to get a little bit of momentum, not just for our group, but for Nigeria, for the continent of Africa because we feel like we represent more than just Nigeria, and really for black people all around the world.

“To get that win and show that we can, was a big moment for us.”

Team USA will likely be fine. They’ve got the talent, and they’ll get better as they play together. But there’s something special happening with Nigeria Basketball, the D’Tigers as they’re known, both for the name on the front of the jersey, and the names on the back.

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